food my piano teachers made me
I've had two piano teachers.
The first moved her life elsewhere before I could properly comprehend a world that centered outside of myself. The second was the first person I ever survived.
Piano teacher one, whose name I have a vague impression begins with a J, came to mind when, pushed out of bed by intense and sudden hunger pangs, I found myself munching on cheese on toast several middle of the nights ago. Childhood activities often double-count as daycare when you have working guardians, but all that meant for me at 4 or 5 was that piano lessons naturally ended with snack time. While the two of us waited for my mom to come pick me up, J would slide two slices of whole wheat bread into the toaster oven, each topped with a slice of mozzarella cheese. I don't think I'd ever seen cheese before then. lol. Imagine being able to trace your first memory of a food that common in your country. I can still smell the way it lazed and glistened into the bread as the temperature rose.
I don't think this was intended to wash down the cheese and bread, but at some interval in the same span of time, I would watch with similar fascination how from an expertly tipped Hershey's syrup bottle, a dark, viscous stream disappeared into and then magically reappeared as it pooled on the bottom of a tall glass of milk. I don't know if she had kids, but, in retrospect, these two dishes should have been the first culinary dreams I actualized once I gained grocery purchasing power and my own kitchen space (cheese and chocolate were strangers to my childhood diet).
Regularly stocked chocolate and cheese not-withstanding, she was, most definitely, an adult.
As an adult, she made me face my good-for-me food nemesis, celery. Occasionally, as our lessons (which took place in the living area of her townhouse apartment) drew on, the thick, hearty smell of chicken soup would waft over from the open kitchen where a soft simmering murmur called to the rumblings of my bottomless stomach. I'm sure she scolded me to pay better attention to the curl of my hand or the keys my fingers were to connect with, but kids have a knack (as old people have the prerogative) for shutting out anything outside of their "thing that most interests me now" realm...just as they have the tendency to ply everything outside of the "thing that most concerns you now" realm in order to distract from the issue.
Celery became one such issue shortly after such lessons ended. There it would sit, a by all measures un-offensive half-moon of fibrous green, the sharpest punch of its pungency boiled down to texture, and in the company of all manner of foods I had been dreaming of tasting since the lesson was lost...but I would still talk around the matter of it and my inevitable ingestion of it until the soup had gone cold and both our moods had soured.
As an adult, she played with me when things dragged long beyond snack time, mainly with, well, the piano. With little prelude I can recall, or possibly, after the first time, at my request, she would drum out the beginnings of the Pink Panther theme and carry on as I improvised a strange dance across the carpet. Like many memories of this type of movement, I was probably just flinging myself around in unregistered fatigue, while chasing the exhausted ends of creative energy...
It's a lot like this type of writing...
The first moved her life elsewhere before I could properly comprehend a world that centered outside of myself. The second was the first person I ever survived.
Piano teacher one, whose name I have a vague impression begins with a J, came to mind when, pushed out of bed by intense and sudden hunger pangs, I found myself munching on cheese on toast several middle of the nights ago. Childhood activities often double-count as daycare when you have working guardians, but all that meant for me at 4 or 5 was that piano lessons naturally ended with snack time. While the two of us waited for my mom to come pick me up, J would slide two slices of whole wheat bread into the toaster oven, each topped with a slice of mozzarella cheese. I don't think I'd ever seen cheese before then. lol. Imagine being able to trace your first memory of a food that common in your country. I can still smell the way it lazed and glistened into the bread as the temperature rose.
I don't think this was intended to wash down the cheese and bread, but at some interval in the same span of time, I would watch with similar fascination how from an expertly tipped Hershey's syrup bottle, a dark, viscous stream disappeared into and then magically reappeared as it pooled on the bottom of a tall glass of milk. I don't know if she had kids, but, in retrospect, these two dishes should have been the first culinary dreams I actualized once I gained grocery purchasing power and my own kitchen space (cheese and chocolate were strangers to my childhood diet).
Regularly stocked chocolate and cheese not-withstanding, she was, most definitely, an adult.
As an adult, she made me face my good-for-me food nemesis, celery. Occasionally, as our lessons (which took place in the living area of her townhouse apartment) drew on, the thick, hearty smell of chicken soup would waft over from the open kitchen where a soft simmering murmur called to the rumblings of my bottomless stomach. I'm sure she scolded me to pay better attention to the curl of my hand or the keys my fingers were to connect with, but kids have a knack (as old people have the prerogative) for shutting out anything outside of their "thing that most interests me now" realm...just as they have the tendency to ply everything outside of the "thing that most concerns you now" realm in order to distract from the issue.
Celery became one such issue shortly after such lessons ended. There it would sit, a by all measures un-offensive half-moon of fibrous green, the sharpest punch of its pungency boiled down to texture, and in the company of all manner of foods I had been dreaming of tasting since the lesson was lost...but I would still talk around the matter of it and my inevitable ingestion of it until the soup had gone cold and both our moods had soured.
As an adult, she played with me when things dragged long beyond snack time, mainly with, well, the piano. With little prelude I can recall, or possibly, after the first time, at my request, she would drum out the beginnings of the Pink Panther theme and carry on as I improvised a strange dance across the carpet. Like many memories of this type of movement, I was probably just flinging myself around in unregistered fatigue, while chasing the exhausted ends of creative energy...
It's a lot like this type of writing...